Page 462 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Gazelles and Lions 459

demoralization and deadly lethargy which has overtaken the West of late years.
it is a compulsion which, the Soviet Union evidently does not share; for her
policy and conduct in the Middle East over the past thirty years, ever since she

attempted to remain in possession of northern Persia at the end of the Second
World War, bear all the hallmarks of a strategy inherited from imperial Russia,
one which successive Tsarist governments had consistently adhered to since
the early eighteenth century.
‘Russia pursues the same system of strategy against Persia and Turkey,’
observed Lord Palmerston, the British foreign secretary, in October 1835; ‘she

creeps down the Black Sea and wants to do the same down the Caspian and to
take both Persia and Turkey on each of their flanks.’ Russia’s bid to dominate
the Black Sea and secure an outlet to the Mediterranean began with Peter the
Great, and by the time that Palmerston made his observation she had annexed
Bessarabia, loosened the Turkish hold over the Danubian principalities of

Moldavia and Wallachia, and played a major part in securing the independence
of the Greek provinces of the Ottoman empire. She had also obtained the right,
which she had not hitherto possessed, to maintain a navy in the Black Sea; and
by the deliberate misconstruction of a treaty clause she claimed the further
right to exercise a protectorate over the Orthodox Christian subjects of the

Ottoman sultan throughout the empire.
The first three decades of the nineteenth century also saw a spectacular
extension of Russia’s frontiers in the Caucasus. In two wars with Persia, the
first in 1804-13, the second in 1826-8, Russia obtained possession of Baku,

Georgia, Daghestan, Erivan, northern Azerbaijan and part of Armenia - in
fact, all of Persia’s Caucasian territories as far south as the River Araxes. She
also assumed for herself the sole right to keep warships in the Caspian Sea. The
threat that might eventually develop to the security of the British dominions in
India from Russia’s penetration of Persia led in 1814 to the conclusion of a
British defensive treaty with the court of Tehran. But owing to the neglect and

parsimony of British governments in England and in India over the next
twenty years the treaty fell into virtual abeyance. British interest in Persia only
revived in the mid-1830s when the reigning shah showed signs of intending,
with Russian encouragement, to compensate himself for the loss of his
Caucasian provinces over the previous two decades by annexing Herat, one of

the three major Afghan principalities. As any extension of Persian authority
into Afghanistan at this stage was, in British eyes, tantamount to giving the
ussians an advanced outpost on the approaches to India, pressure was applied
to the shah to abandon his plans. His refusal to do so led the British govern­
ment in India not only to mount an armed demonstration in the Persian Gulf
ut also (such are the curious inconstancies and contradictions of Oriental

politics) to send an expedition to occupy Kabul a year or so later. For the
assumption upon which British policy towards Persia was henceforth to pro-
ee was that Afghanistan served just as much as Persia as a buffer state to